Accounting and the government of the agricultural economy: Arrigo Serpieri and the Reclamation Consortia

ABSTRACT

Drawing on primary sources gathered from repositories in Abruzzo, Bologna and Rome, this study – underpinned by the framework of governmentality – analyses the accounting, financial and governmental practices deployed as a consequence of the Reclamation Consortia in Fascist Italy. In a scenario stimulated by the ascent of the Fascist discourse on the Agricultural Corporative Economy, this analysis seeks to show the new technologies of government deployed by the State and local communities through the Reclamation Consortia Reform. The study also unveils the leading role in the change process played by Arrigo Serpieri who, besides acting as Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Agriculture in Mussolini’s government, was considered at the time Italy’s most important agricultural expert.

KEYWORDS:

• Accounting
• agriculture
• corporative economy
• Fascism
• governmentality

Acknowledgements

The authors are largely indebted to the editor, Cheryl McWatters, for the warm encouragement, suggestions and continuous feedback provided on the different drafts of the manuscript. Comments from anonymous reviewers were also much appreciated. Many thanks are also due to Steve Walker, Yannick Lemarchand and Delfina Gomes for their suggestions on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We have also benefitted from comments of participants at the International Festschrift in Honour of Professor Yannick Lemarchand, Nantes (November 2015), at the First International Seminar of Siena (December 2015) and at the Fourteenth World Congress of Accounting Historians at Pescara (June 2016).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The same empirical approach had concurrently supported the development of Italian accounting and business studies of the times, such as those triggered by Fabio Besta (Sargiacomo, Servalli, and Andrei 2012).

2. The historian D’Autilia also remarked that Serpieri could be connected with Francesco Saverio Nitti (an Italian economist who served from 1911 to 1914 as Minister of Agriculture, Industry and Trade under Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti and who was also Prime Minister of Italy between 1919 and 1920). The two men held similar views on state intervention and shared a commitment to modernity (D’Onofrio 2016).

3. D’Onofrio points out that the ‘Battle for Grain’ was just one aspect of the ‘ruralist’ ideology that put the countryside and its traditional values at the core of the nation. The preservation of a healthy rural population, ‘forti rurali’ was praised by Mussolini and contrasted with the corruption of the cities. This was akin to agrarianist movements elsewhere in Europe and the USA (D’Onofrio 2016).

4. As underscored by Tassinari, a protagonist of the time and one of Serpieri pupils: ‘the Bonifica Integrale aims at the cultivation of the marshes and the amelioration of all land extensively cultivated. At present this tremendous action deals with 4275 million hectares. From the beginning of the Fascist era until 1 July 1933, 5270 million lire were spent on it. The best way of appreciating this achievement is to realise that the Italian state spent only 1782 million lire for the improvement of the soil before the Fascist era. Together with the general “back to the land” programme, with the closer connexion of the peasant with the soil, and with the Government’s population policy, the Bonifica Integrale is a boon for the whole of Italian economic life’ (Tassinari 1935, 84).

5. Serpieri himself wrote in 1948, that reclamation ‘remained a building only partially built. In limited cases it could have brought to maturity all its fruits, but in too many others it left […] a strange tangle of things done and not done waiting for their completion’ (Serpieri 1948, 150).